Ubuntu

Software Heritage is the project for which I’ve been working during the past two and a half years now. The grand vision of the project is to build the universal software archive, which will collect, preserve and share the Software Commons.

Today, we’ve announced that Software Heritage is archiving the contents of Debian daily. I’m reposting this article on my blog as it will probably be of interest to readers of Planet Debian.

TL;DR: Software Heritage now archives all source packages of Debian as well as its security archive daily. Everything is ready for archival of other Debian derivatives as well. Keep on reading to get details of the work that made this possible.

Lots of companies want to collect data about their users. This is a good thing, generally; being data-driven is important, and it’s jolly hard to know where best to focus your efforts if you don’t know what your people are like. However, this sort of data collection also gives people a sense of disquiet; what are you going to do with that data about me? How do I get you to stop using it? What conclusions are you drawing from it? I’ve spoken about this sense of disquiet in the past, and you can watch (or read) that talk for a lot more detail about how and why people don’t like it.

So, what can we do about it? As I said, being data-driven is a good thing, and you can’t be data-driven if you haven’t got any data to be driven by. How do we enable people to collect data about you without compromising your privacy?

Well, there are some ways. Before I dive into them, though, a couple of brief asides: there are some people who believe that you shouldn’t be allowed to collect any data on your users whatsoever; that the mere act of wanting to do so is in itself a compromise of privacy. This is not addressed to those people. What I want is a way that both sides can get what they want: companies and projects can be data-driven, and users don’t get their privacy compromised. If what you want is that companies are banned from collecting anything… this is not for you. Most people are basically OK with the idea of data collection, they just don’t want to be victimised by it, now or in the future, and it’s that property that we want to protect.

Similarly, if you’re a company who wants to know everything about each individual one of your users so you can sell that data for money, or exploit it on a user-by-user basis, this isn’t for you either. Stop doing that.

Linux is attracting a growing number of users to its enormous selection of distribution systems. These 'distros' are operating systems with the Linux kernel at their foundation and a variety of software built on top to create a desktop environment tailored to the needs of users.

Ubuntu and Linux Mint are among the most popular flavours of these.

Ubuntu's name derives from a Southern Africa philosophy that can loosely be defined as "humanity to others", a spirit its founders wanted to harness in a complete operating system that is both free and highly customisable.

Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu and built as a user-friendly alternative with full out-of-the-box multimedia support. By some measures, Linux Mint has surpassed the popularity of its progenitor, but Ubuntu retains a loyal following of its own.

Canonical has apparently partnered with Rigado, a private company that provides Bluetooth LE (Low Energy) modules and custom IoT gateways for them, as well as for Wi-Fi, LoRa, and Thread wireless technologies, to deploy its slimmed-down Ubuntu Core operating system across Rigado’s Edge Connectivity gateway solutions.

As you are aware, last year Canonical decided to stop the development of its futuristic Unity 8 desktop for Ubuntu and the Ubuntu Touch mobile OS. Days after their sad announcement a few community members appeared interested in taking over the development of Unity 8, the most promising one being Yunit.

However, the Yunit project didn't manage to improve Unity 8 for desktops in the last few months as much as the community would have wanted, and, after a long battle, they decided to pass the baton to UBports team, which is announcing the initial build for devs and an official website for Unity 8.

UBports devs announced today on Twitter that Canonical sent them a few old Ubuntu Phone devices to continue the development of the Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system.

Now that Canonical has ceased the development of its revolutionary Unity 8 user interface for the Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system used on smartphones from Meizu and BQ, the company decided to donate several devices to the UBports community.

UBports is recreating Ubuntu Touch, maintaining, updating, and modifying its code to offer the world a free and open source mobile operating system for those who want to use something else than Android, iOS, and what else is still out there.

If you’re looking for an easy way to edit application launchers and menu entries on Ubuntu you’ll want to check out AppEditor.

AppEditor is an easy to use

Alacarte has been the go-to menu editor for almost as long as I’ve been using Ubuntu. It’s still perfectly functional, but it hasn’t really changed since then.

‘AppEditor’ would probably be better named Menu Entry Editor or Launcher Editor, or something other than App Editor as, rather than edit apps, it lets you edit app menu entries for apps, rather than the apps itself.

Juju is Canonical’s open source modelling tool for cloud software — it handles operations designed to deploy, configure, manage, maintain and scale applications via the command line interface, or through its optional GUI.

While Canonical is no longer involved in Unity 8 development, the community-driven UBports team continues working on their "Unity 8" and "Ubuntu Touch" efforts with a hope to deliver a developer ISO soon.

Sadly the Yunit project that also forked Unity 8's code-base doesn't seem to be active at least not regularly anymore, but the UBports team is working on delivering. In their latest Q&A session they share that Unity 8 on the desktop is coming together. One of the developers commented, "While it's both good and pretty, it's not 'pretty good'."

Besides Mir 0.30 being released this week, other Mir progress was also made by these Canonical developers working on forging Mir into a viable Wayland compositor.

Gerry Boland of Canonical's Mir team has shared that Snapd 2.31 now supports any Snap implementing the Wayland interface. This allows for Mir to be shipped as a Snap and support Wayland clients using Canonical's app sandboxing approach alternative to Flatpaks.

The development of the next Ubuntu LTS release, i.e., Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic Beaver, is going on in full swing. The desktop development team has decided to add a new option in the installation process that allows you to perform a lean installation of Ubuntu.

If you’ve spent any time in the Snapcraft forum, it’s quite likely you’ve come across Dan Llewellyn – a keen community advocate or self-proclaimed Snapcrafter. Dan has always had a passion for computing and is completely self-taught. Outside of the community, Dan is a freelance WordPress developer. After getting into the open source world around 1998, he has switched between various Linux distros including Suse, RedHat, Gentoo before settling on Ubuntu from the 5.04 release onwards. A longtime participant in the UK Ubuntu chatroom – where he met Canonical’s Alan Pope – Dan admits he was never that active before Snapcraft came along.

It was spending time in the UK chatroom around 2016 that he discovered snaps which piqued his interest. “I saw the movement of changing Clicks to snaps and thought it was an interesting idea. It’s more widely focused than a mobile app delivery system and I’ve always liked things that also worked on the server, IoT and elsewhere” Dan comments. With a previous desire to get into mobile app development and seeing the move away from Ubuntu Touch, Dan was eager to see Snapcraft succeed and felt like it was something he could contribute to.

"We want to be able to focus our engineering efforts on the things that matter most to our users, and in order to do that we need to get some more data about sort of setups our users have and which software they are running on it," explained Will Cooke, the director of Ubuntu Desktop at Canonical.

To gather that information Cooke proposed adding a checkbox to the Ubuntu installer that says something like "Send diagnostics information to help improve Ubuntu". "This would be checked by default" Cooke wrote.

Canonical announced plans to roll out a user data and diagnostics collection system with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver). This new system will collect data on the user's OS details, hardware setup, apps and OS settings.

"We want to be able to focus our engineering efforts on the things that matter most to our users, and in order to do that we need to get some more data about sort of setups our users have and which software they are running on it," said Will Cooke, Director of Ubuntu Desktop at Canonical.